SIOS Software Delivers High Availability Data Protection in a User-Friendly Cloud Environment

Bonfiglioli is a leading Italian design, manufacturing and distribution company that specializes in industrial automation, mobile machinery and wind energy products. With more than 3,600 employees in locations around the world, the company relies on its IT infrastructure and applications such as its business critical SAP-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application to keep business operations running smoothly.

They chose to use SIOS DataKeeper to overcome barriers to moving business-critical SAP ERP system to cloud.

The Challenge

This forward-looking company’s IT team implemented a program to move part of their IT operations into the Microsoft Azure cloud in a methodical, phased approach. Another key aspect was to leverage Azure as a Disaster Recovery site. A key component of their migration planning was ensuring that they could still meet strict SLAs for application performance and enjoy High Availability Data Protection in the cloud.

Operations in their on-premises environment were protected by VMware clustering that allows Windows Server Failover Clustering to manage a failover of operations to a secondary server in the event of an infrastructure fault or failure. Providing this type of protection in the cloud posed a challenge because guest-clustering with shared-bus disks is not a viable solution in a public cloud.

The Evaluation

Bonfiglioli considered a variety of options to protect their sensitive, business-critical SAP ERP system. They turned to their partner BGP Management Consulting for advice. Based on their extensive experience in helping companies like Bonfiglioli provide high availability protection for important application in the cloud, BGP recommended using SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition. The SIOS DataKeeper software had several key advantages. First, SIOS DataKeeper is the only certified high availability clustering solution for SAP in a public cloud. Second, BGP had firsthand experience with SIOS DataKeeper. They knew that it was very simple to install, transparent to the OS, and a proven, highly effective solution.

The Solution

Creating a cluster in VMware using Raw Device Mapping and shared-bus disks (RDM) is challenging and creates limitations for backing up the VMs. SIOS DataKeeper removed these barriers by enabling Bonfiglioli to create a cluster environment without the need for RDM. They simply created a two-node cluster in VMware. SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition added to synchronize storage in each cluster instance. The synchronized storage appears to WSFC as a single shared storage disk in their on-premises environment. The SIOS DataKeeper software also provides high availability data protection for their SAP Central Services Instance. As well as eliminates a single point of failure risk of the SAP Netweaver architecture. SIOS DataKeeper replicates an SSD-tiered disk partition in the company’s on-premises data center. Thereby allowing Bonfiglioli to restore their VMs on Microsoft Azure in the event of a disaster

The Results

Daniele Bovina, Systems Architect, Bonfiglioli said that SIOS DataKeeper product is SAP certified. Best of all, it is rock-solid and very transparent to the OS. This allows them to take advantage of all the simplicity and benefits of a Windows Server Failover Cluster. And as well as the cost-efficiencies and flexibility of the Microsoft Azure cloud.

To find out more about SIOS products, go here
To read about how SIOS helped Bonfiglioli achieve High Availability Data Protection, go here